By Charlotte Lerg.
In July 2024, Charlotte Lerg (University of Munich, Amerika-Institut) and Charlotte Faucher (University of Bristol, School of Modern Languages) were able to meet to work on a grant application thanks to the support of MMB. The project looks at the relationship between diplomats and the media in Europe (including Britain) and the US. As they began shaping this research project between Bristol and Munich they exchanged e-mails, logged onto video calls and co-wrote texts in shared documents. They also involved colleagues from our various research groups, including MMB and Manchester’s Culture of Diplomacy, which gathers (online!) academics from the UK, Europe, North America and Asia. However, it was their in-person meeting over the summer that really propelled the project forward. Having two uninterrupted days to bounce ideas off one another, ask questions to each other about how we envisaged certain aspects of the proposal, and also keep ourselves motivated over coffee and meals was priceless.
The following text was written by Charlotte Lerg after this July meeting.
As I was waiting in transit at Heathrow Airport on my way back home, I reflected on the role of such in-person meetings for academic culture.
Thinking about this historically, we could ask ourselves how medieval and early modern scholars were able to maintain detailed academic discussions, often over years, entirely based on the exchange of letters, sometimes never meeting in person. However, while a letter certainly does not substitute an in-person encounter, these ties could be a lot stronger than the modern-day networks that are often mediated by technology. In fact, epistolary practices in early modern culture often involved a considerable commitment to an imagined co-presence in a republic of letters.
The perceived value of in-person encounters for academic discourse can be seen in the way the so-called transport revolution, that came with industrialization, very quickly led scholars to congregate on a regular basis. Around the year 1900 there were about five times as many international academic conferences as just two decades earlier. World exhibitions became convenient occasions for the newly emerging and professionalizing academic associations across the Western world to hold international congresses. Peter Burke has termed this development the ‘steam age in the republic of letters’. Academic gatherings in person remain central to how higher education works and yet, in most other areas of life thinking has begun to move away from steam-age disregard for natural resources. We are also increasingly questioning the social hierarchies of travelling for leisure or edification. Why is the republic of letters struggling to fully embrace the digital age?
In 2003, when the internet was still relatively young and the turn to user-generated content and multi-directional online communication was only just on the horizon (MySpace was founded in 2003 as was Skype; platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Zoom were still a few years away), sociologist John Urry contemplated the role of travel in increasingly transnational social network-formations. He observed an intriguing correlation in the growth of travel (both in frequency and distance) on the one hand, and advances in communication technology that could potentially replace in-person contact on the other. He posited that the larger but looser networks facilitated by technology were made up of weaker ties than previous networks, because they required less commitment in their creation and maintenance. In order to be meaningful, therefore, they had to be periodically shored up through in-person meetings.
The emergence of social media has proven that point: the difference between ‘knowing’ someone digitally or in real life has become more pronounced. Dwelling on this issue, Urry introduced the notion of ‘meetingness’ to discuss the added values of physical co-presence for professional as well as personal meetings. He also underscores two other components: the flow of in-person conversation and the impact of mutual commitment to the meeting. Even if bracketed by small talk, it remains extremely challenging to create a digital conversation space that enables an organic exchange of speech and gesture cues or the collaborative development of ideas as can occur face to face. Moreover, there is something to be said for the difference in our mindset depending on whether we just log on to a meeting and then off again or, instead, plan, arrange, fund and undertake a journey. In short, putting ourselves physically into a different place also puts us into a different headspace. In academia, especially, these two components of ‘meetingness’ can hardly be underestimated – even if they remain somewhat elusive – whether the potential for innovation in a free-flowing conversation or the value of co-presence in body and mind.
When Covid 19 hit and we were suddenly all conferencing online, some suggested this could ring in a new phase of academic exchange, no longer dependent on the ability to travel. There were indeed several arguments in favour of this vision. Logging onto a video call certainly requires less time and less money than taking a trip. Consequently, it is also a lot less disruptive to family life and more compatible with care commitments. Moreover, while it requires some technological equipment and ideally a stable internet connection, it is also more inclusive socially and geographically. Finally, in times of climate change and environmental crisis, fewer academics flying around the world just to deliver a keynote or say a few words at a panel must seem like a good idea.
And yet, as the pandemic ebbed the academic circuit soon resurged. Many rejoiced in finally meeting colleagues again in person and argued that, after all, the most productive moment of a conference was the coffee break, which despite some efforts in virtual reality, could not be recreated in the digital world. But is it really just the social side of these intellectual gatherings that makes them so fruitful or is there indeed something to the unique quality of ‘meetingness’ in academic practice? And if we conclude that the digital world remains a limited alternative to co-presence for academic networks, how can we seek ways to make academic mobility more inclusive and sustainable?